West Central to take on Pleasant Hill tonight

WINCHESTER — An injured player in the backfield forced West Central coach Adam Brockhouse to do some tinkering last week against Calhoun.

Fullback Drake Gregory sat out the game with a head injury. It’s nothing major, Brockhouse said, but he couldn’t clear the concussion steps in time for the Calhoun game. He’s ready to go this week.

So tailback Andrew Kaufmann moved back to fullback, and freshman Ryan Moore moved from tight end to tailback.

“(Moore) kind of surprised us,” Brockhouse said. “I didn’t expect to see him … I think he had close to 115, 120 on the ground. Had a pretty solid game. When you’re quick and you get a little crease, he’s going to be gone. Now we’ve just got to get him into being a belly runner, being a little more physical downhill. But being a freshman, I thought he did really well handling that situation, especially at Calhoun.”

With West Central trailing 22-14 at halftime, Moore broke free for a 59-yard touchdown run to tie the score, then followed that with a 45-yard TD run to give the Cougars a 30-22 lead. They went on to beat Calhoun 38-30.

“We do a lot of sweep,” Brockhouse said. “I’m a big buck-sweep guy, especially from my roots. I love to see it run, and run really well. So I was used to seeing tailbacks find that cutback. We struggled at the beginning of the year — couldn’t find that cutback, couldn’t find that cutback. And that’s one thing there in the fourth quarter — we ran 28-sweep, and he did it, finally. He found that cutback. My backside POAs got there, and he found the crease and went.”

West Central is 3-3 heading into tonight’s game at Pleasant Hill (1-5). The contest was moved up a day because of a lack of available officials on Friday night. Kickoff is at 7:30 p.m.

“Offensively, we still need to get rid of some dumb mistakes, some jumping off-sides — we’re struggling going on two right now,” Brockhouse said. “But for the most part, with people being in a couple of different places, we had a pretty decent showing offensively.”

Kaufmann had another great game against Calhoun, finishing with 115 yards rushing on 23 attempts. He also caught a short three-yard pass from Wes Hughes, then turned upfield and ran 61 yards for a touchdown to give West Central a 14-8 lead in the first half.

“We finally got our feet back underneath of us, started getting back on track,” Brockhouse said. “We moved Andrew around here and there. He was a tailback. We had to move him back to fullback just due to one of our other fullbacks being dinged up, so who knows what this week’s going to bring, depending on what our backfield looks like, walking into another must-win game.”

Brockhouse said to beat Pleasant Hill tonight, the Cougars have to stop the Wolves’ running game. That means stopping Kodiak Rogers and Isaiha Rogers.

“We’ve got to stop the run,” the coach said. “Rogers is a very, very physical running back. Up front-wise, they do a very good job getting off the football. They always have. I wish I could get some of the big boys that they always seem to produce. Every year they’re big, physical up front. And if our D-line and linebackers can control Rogers and Isaiha, we’ll be all right.”